Now you don’t need to create an ecommerce site if you want to sell few items. You can leverage blomming.com to sell things. You can sell
it from your blog, your own website and from your Facebook page. To understand
more about blomming.com, how it works and their future plans, we connected to a
young and dynamic, 31 years old, Nicola Junior Vitto, Founder and Product
strategist at Blomming.com
What is Blomming into
and what problem are you solving?
Blomming is opening the Social Commerce to everyone,
individuals and businesses. The idea is that in this era of fragmentation
building and managing an online presence is a tough job. Of course you have to
do it, but it is a time-consuming activity that requires a lot of effort. In
the same time, it's difficult to bring your *business* online: it's mainly
about communicating. Our idea is putting
these things together: Blomming is an e-commerce platform that can be used
independently: opening an online Shop is a matter of minutes. But you can also
bring your single products or your entire catalogue on your blog, on your
website *and* within your Facebook page. In this way you can preserve your investment
and your online brand identity while having a monetization tool that goes
together with your communication activities.
How did this idea come to your mind?
At the beginning I thought of putting together the two
things, E-Commerce and Social Media. But now Blomming is much more than this,
it's a complete multi-channel, pervasive E-Commerce system.
Typically, how does
it work and who are the potential customers?
Whoever wants to sell online can use our solution. But it's particularly
appreciated by individuals and businesses that has and independent activity,
e.g. artists, artisans, young designers, independent fashion stylists and so
on. But also more established brands are adopting our solution - our latest
announcement in this field is the soon-to-be-released Facebook Store for
Jackerson, that is a famous fashion brand (see http://company.blomming.com for
details)
What do you think about the future of Blomming?
On July we received a relevant early stage investment, and
now we're headed towards a fast product development and international
expansion. In few weeks we'll be releasing a mobile application that will
enhance our offering, allowing our sellers to access the fast growing mobile commerce
opportunity
Which all Geographies
are you targeting?
More than geographies we target languages and platforms. We
are now running in English as the first language, Spanish and Italian, and we want
to build on this even if we'll add new languages soon. Also, we strongly
believe in the power of blogs and, of course, in the importance of Facebook:
these are like "continents" for us.
How are you building
the platform, have you tied up with any IT vendor?
Our platform is built completely in-house, using
best-of-breed Lean and Agile technologies and methodologies
How are you
generating revenues?
Our business model is based on revenue share, taken upon an
actual sale. But we are still offering our service for free in order to accelerate
growth. Reaching a critical mass will allow us to keep the fee very low
What is your
marketing strategy?
We are intrinsically social: this means that every Seller on
Blomming usually propagates the information about the platform to their friends
and customer. This is because we believe that the product must be able to run
"on its own leg". In the same time we strongly use Social Media to
gain new public. These are the only tools that we used in our bootstrap, and
grew up from zero to 7.500 Shops in little more than one year. Now we'll add
also some web marketing spending: a good news about our platform is that we are
not Google- nor Facebook- dependent. Our referral traffic is very balanced, and
so we can choose how to move in the way that's better for our sellers.
Where do you see
Blomming in next 3-5 years’ time?
We want to build a business that manages a huge number of
Shops, Sellers, products, generating a high volume of sales. But thinking about
the long-term vision we think that E-Commerce is a huge opportunity for the Web itself. The advertising business is
lacking innovation, while the subscription-based models are still struggling. We
think that a "liquid" E-Commerce system, to be integrated everywhere, even on a single-product level, without
bothering the users but being truly social can be the new relevant monetization
option for the Internet.